Cosmological Trauma in Postcolonial Literature

In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments regarding the relationship between trauma and postcolonial theory: trauma theory has always been postcolonial, and it is not yet postcolonial. By highlighting the similarities between Cathy Caruth’s and Edward Said’s readings of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, we argue that trauma theory, much like postcolonial critique, is centrally concerned with the undoing of identitarian binds. We therefore suggest that Caruth’s theory of implicated subjectivity, which she pulls from Freud, is more in line with postcolonial theory than critics of her Eurocentrism (who often hinge their argument on identity politics) have recognized. At the same time, her theory of implication must become more postcolonial, we argue, by moving beyond its anthropocentric coordinates. As authors such as Derek Walcott and Uzodinma Iweala demonstrate, a postcolonial approach to trauma studies must begin by apprehending the cosmological damage wreaked by colonial modernity, which implicates not only humans, but entire systems of relations amidst the cosmos. By placing Walcott’s and Iweala’s writings in dialogue with Freud’s reading of Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, we propose our concept of cosmological trauma, which names the rupture in relational networks central to colonization.